Wyoming and the Biden administration are in a standoff over electric vehicle charging stations.
And the stakes are high. The quarrel could leave a Wyoming-size hole in President Joe Biden’s national network of 500,000 charging ports, while the state stands to lose control over millions of federal dollars, writes POLITICO’s E&E News reporter David Ferris.
Here’s the rub: The bipartisan infrastructure law of 2021 allocated $7.5 billion over five years for states to build out charging stations for electric cars. The administration is requiring those stations to be located every 50 miles, largely along highways, so drivers feel confident they won’t get stranded. Them’s the rules.
But the thing about Wyoming is it’s huge and sparsely populated (it’s larger than Michigan with a population the size of Baltimore). The state says building and maintaining a charging station every 50 miles would require vast resources with little payoff. Only about 500 people own electric cars in the state.
Wyoming crunched the numbers and projected that the charging stations the administration wants wouldn’t be profitable until the 2040s. And since the federal funding lasts only five years, the state doesn’t want to be saddled with a massive bill for over a decade.
“Wyoming has no desire to establish infrastructure that will likely fail,” the state told the federal office overseeing the charging network effort.
Wyoming’s proposal: But Wyoming didn’t reject the money outright. Instead, it asked the feds to fund chargers along smaller highways that serve its tourist gems, such as Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks — routes that don’t fit the administration’s parameters but see a lot more Tesla traffic.
While the National Park Service supported that approach, the administration said no. And so the perennial struggle between states and the federal government over who knows best continues.
It’s happened before: Wyoming, of course, is not the first state to reject federal dollars for infrastructure projects it doesn’t like. Under former President Barack Obama, then-Republican Florida Gov. Rick Scott returned $2.4 billion in federal funds for a high-speed train that would have run between Tampa and Orlando.
It’s Tuesday — thank you for tuning in to POLITICO’s Power Switch. I’m your host, Arianna Skibell. Power Switch is brought to you by the journalists behind E&E News and POLITICO Energy. Send your tips, comments, questions to [email protected]
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The Biden administration finalized a rare veto to block a massive gold and copper mine in Alaska’s pristine Bristol Bay watershed.
But the brawl over the deposit, fueled by global clamor for materials to build carbon-free technology, could keep the region in the spotlight, writes Hannah Northey.
Developers are already vowing to fight the determination in court, calling the move illegal and unprecedented. Others who have spent years fighting the project in one of the world’s premier salmon fisheries are quick to note mining could crop up in other areas around the region.
SCOTUS bait?
California’s decades-old right to impose automobile pollution limits more stringent than the federal government’s standards could be on a collision course with the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, writes Lesley Clark.
Seventeen Republican-led states have challenged that authority, arguing the carve-out for California violates the Constitution. The case could land at the Supreme Court this year.
Santos bows out
Scandal-plagued New York Rep. George Santos told his GOP colleagues today that he would forgo the House committees he’d been assigned, write Olivia Beavers and Sarah Ferris.
The announcement comes days after senior House Republicans seated the New York freshman trailed by a cloud of apparent serial fabrications on two committees: Science and Small Business.
Coal rebound
The EU’s use of coal-fired power rose last year as countries faced a shortage of energy supplies related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but the increase was not as high as many feared, writes Victor Jack.
That’s in part due to a boost in renewable energy production, which generated a record 22 percent of the EU’s electricity last year.
Rolling in dough: Exxon Mobil Corp. rocketed to its highest-ever annual profit last year of $55.7 billion, surpassing Chevron Corp.’s annual profit of $35.5 billion.
Transitions: A new rule in China is threatening to disrupt U.S. solar ambitions.
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New research from artificial intelligence projects that global warming will hit the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius sometime between 2033 and 2035.
General Motors Co. announced it will invest in the largest planned U.S. lithium mine — a sign that U.S. automakers are looking to shore up domestic minerals for EV production.
Scientists at Stanford University claim to have solved a big problem with future EV batteries, but the solution might not be cheap.
That’s it for today, folks! Thanks for reading.
